I share some of your resentment for having to learn new things to engage in what is arguably a trivial activity at this point in time - sharing (formatted) text or other media with your teammates. This is probably a factor in why many of our users prefer "simpler" approaches... At least from their perspective. One would argue markdown is simpler and faster than using any MS Word-style interface if you are experienced in its syntax and rules.
Learning markdown is pretty easy for many developers, and for some it becomes 2nd nature when typing into things that support it on a regular basis: Git[Hub/Lab], Slack, Mattermost, WhatsApp (partial support), etc. The value-add as you put additional markdown-enabled platforms into your workflow is pretty substantial. I don't have to do a mental context switch every time I go between editing a GitHub issue comment and typing some code block to another developer in Mattermost.
You can create some really nice looking README.md files if you spend a little extra time with things like headings and quote/code blocks. I believe there are several options (one hosted in GitHub's API if you prefer GFM) for taking MD files and generating high-quality HTML or PDF output.
I'd conclude by saying that markdown documents are much easier to source control. Taking a diff of a docx or a pdf is going to get you nowhere. A diff of a markdown file might as well just be a diff of any arbitrary plain text document. The syntax itself has a very small footprint, so you are looking at mostly just plain text minus 5-10% overhead on the markdown.
Slack doesn’t actually do Markdown; it’s just a little bit ahead of what Hacker News offers. And diffing PDFs and Word Documents is possible, but annoying: you need a custom diff tool for it that you integrate with Git.
Learning markdown is pretty easy for many developers, and for some it becomes 2nd nature when typing into things that support it on a regular basis: Git[Hub/Lab], Slack, Mattermost, WhatsApp (partial support), etc. The value-add as you put additional markdown-enabled platforms into your workflow is pretty substantial. I don't have to do a mental context switch every time I go between editing a GitHub issue comment and typing some code block to another developer in Mattermost.
You can create some really nice looking README.md files if you spend a little extra time with things like headings and quote/code blocks. I believe there are several options (one hosted in GitHub's API if you prefer GFM) for taking MD files and generating high-quality HTML or PDF output.
I'd conclude by saying that markdown documents are much easier to source control. Taking a diff of a docx or a pdf is going to get you nowhere. A diff of a markdown file might as well just be a diff of any arbitrary plain text document. The syntax itself has a very small footprint, so you are looking at mostly just plain text minus 5-10% overhead on the markdown.